Strong interaction physics with pions at LAMPF: Report of the study group on future opportunities at LAMPF

The LAMPF accelerator, with its high-intensity teams of pions and array of high-resolution spectrometers, provides opportunities for investigations of nuclear structure as well as of strong-interaction hadron dynamics. During operation of LAMPF as a national users facility, Nuclear Physics has undergone an evolution in the way it pictures nuclei: from a system of nucleons interacting through potentials to a system of mutually coupled nucleons, {Delta}(1232)`s, and mesons. While nuclear physics is in the midst of yet another shift of paradigm, with quarks and gluons playing a central role, the traditional picture still has great predictive power, and LAMPF has new opportunities to contribute to solving problems of current interest. At the same time, LAMPF is poised to make important contributions to the evolving area of nonperturbative QCD, where we will be learning how to connect phenomena at large momentum transfer to those at lower momentum scales. where the physically observable hadrons are the natural degrees of freedom. Within the traditional area, exploration of nuclei having extreme ratios of neutron/proton number is of growing interest in a variety of contexts, including astrophysics. Pion double charge exchange (the ({pi}{sup {plus_minus}}, {pi}{sup {plus_minus}}) processes) can produce proton-rich nuclei such as {sup 9}C, {sup 10}C, and {sup 11}N as well as neutron-rich nuclei such as {sup 10}He, {sup 11}Li, {sup 14}Be, and {sup 17}B. With spectrometers available for analyzing the outgoing pion spectra, one can study interesting and controversial modes of motion (soft-dipole modes) and obtain angular distributions that explore the spatial extent of neutron halos